We Were Never Here, page 9
Another day of work. Somehow I sat through meetings and replied to emails and listened to gossip in the break room. Aaron and I texted throughout the day, the casual banter of the newly dating, and I clung to the dopamine spurt I got every time his name appeared on my lock screen. I waited in line for overpriced burrito bowls with Priya, taking in her patter of Tinder-date stories. All the while my id threatened to commandeer my throat, scream it aloud: We buried a man soaked in his own blood. It wouldn’t even be the whole truth. Only half, one body of two.
Kristen and I scheduled a call for the evening. Be careful not to mention The Thing, Emily, in case anybody’s listening. My heart pounded as I sat on my couch, earbuds in, waiting.
“Hey, Em!” So cheery. And what was whining in the background?
“Hi. Are you outside?”
“Yeah, I’m walking to work. Is it super loud?” The wind swelled, then quieted; a distant car honked.
“Uh, it’s fine, I can hear you.” There was something too casual about it, her multitasking on our first post-Chile call. “How are you doing?”
“Fine. Work is awful. I’m wishing we were still on vacation together.”
I frowned and sank into the pillows behind me. “I’m so sorry work sucks. But how are you doing?”
“All right. So look, I know you said maybe waiting a year would be better for backpacking, but what if we plan it for my summer? If we start traveling right after the holidays, you’ll escape the hellhole that is Milwaukee in the winter, and we could even kick things off in Sydney—January is perfect surfing weather.”
I was glad we weren’t on a video call, because I couldn’t keep the shock off my face. She was acting so completely fine. I loved Kristen, would give anything to be physically with her right now as we processed our horror. But clearly, something about us together served as a beacon for very bad things. The two of us traveling alone were a magnet for violence. Why would we risk it again? And, hell, how could she consider globetrotting when she’d been attacked just days before?
“That’s…something to think about,” I said carefully. “I miss you so, so hard. But…I need a little time before I’ll feel ready to travel again. Does that make sense?”
“Oh, that’s fine,” she said, too quickly, and changed the subject. We chatted for a few minutes more about anything other than Paolo, and then she arrived at her office. I hung up confused and sad.
And profoundly unsettled.
CHAPTER 12
Aaron and I made plans to meet at a cozy dive bar in his neighborhood. I found parking on a side street and stepped out into the dark, instantly reminded of Milwaukee’s reputation as a patchwork of safe blocks and not-so-safe ones a few yards away. There was a man in a baseball cap leaning on a lamppost and I averted my eyes as I passed. But then I heard footsteps behind me and my heart roared, barbed adrenaline shooting through my limbs. I picked up the pace and darted across the street, then stole a glance over my shoulder.
It was nothing. He’d turned down another road. Just a guy going about his business, unaware that he’d set my nervous system on fire.
I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong.
But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day.
I heaved open the bar’s door, grateful for the belch of warm, beery air that enveloped me. I breathed it in for a moment: people chatting and ordering PBR and munching on cheese balls brighter than a highlighter. Studding the wood-paneled walls were neon beer signs and dusty antlers and mounted fish, and I felt I’d slipped through a portal to a safer dimension.
I searched the faces around the bar and then headed for the back room, where a foosball table and old arcade games hulked between scratched wooden tables.
“Emily!” Aaron rose to kiss me hello. I liked how confidently he did it, like that was how we always greeted each other. “What are you having?”
He rushed off to get me a drink and I pulled out my phone. Kristen had sent me a photo from what I assumed was her office: its sweeping view of Sydney, the opera house twinkling in the distance. “Sure I can’t convince you?” she’d texted, with a winky face. Wet concrete tumbled in my belly.
I jumped as a glass plonked onto the table in front of me. “They were out of Spotted Cow, so I got you something called a Booyah.” Aaron touched my shoulder, then slid onto a chair. “The bartender said it’s similar. Hey, what is it?”
“It’s nothing. Sorry.”
“Everything okay?”
“It was Kristen.” I hesitated. “She’s trying to convince me to meet her in Sydney for six months of backpacking.”
“Really.”
“Yup. I know she misses me. Plus, I think she doesn’t like being so far from…well, everyone.”
“And how are you feeling about it?”
I pursed my lips. “I told her it’s not a good time. ’Cause work is going well and, like, socially…” I gestured at the table, our two pint glasses standing tall, then blushed. I didn’t add the third big reason: Kristen and I traveling together kept ending in bloodshed. “But she keeps asking about it.”
“Oh man, I didn’t want to influence you, but dude. I’m so relieved.” He laughed and swiped up his beer, and my stomach flipped.
“I’m glad you’re relieved.” The warm bubbles in my chest rose, cautiously hopeful.
He nodded, thinking. “Weird she’d try to steal you away from me. But I guess, like, hoes before bros.”
“When she pitched it, she didn’t exactly…know about you. Yet.” My voice was slow and stretchy, a tape at the wrong speed.
He started to laugh. “And why’s that?”
I swallowed. “I’ve gotten my hopes up a lot for things to turn into nothing. I told you I haven’t seen anyone seriously in a while—shit, not that we’re serious—I just mean…”
He grinned at me, eyebrows high, waiting for more.
In a rush: “Just because I didn’t want to jinx it, you know? There’s nothing worse than telling your friends all excitedly about a new guy and then having it fizzle out. And then they’re asking you about it and you feel foolish.” Well, there definitely were a few worse things. Kristen and I knew all about them. “But anyway, then I did tell her about you. On our last night. And she’s so happy for me! But I guess she’s pretty stoked on her backpacking idea. Can’t blame her for trying, right?”
He stretched his arm around my shoulders. My whole body lit up under the weight. “Got it. Well, tell her you’ve got a boyfriend. That’s why you don’t want to move.”
I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. “Boyfriend, huh?”
“Kinda feels like it, right?”
I looked away when the eye contact got too intense. “It kinda does.”
“Good. Just don’t become a vagabond right right now. I suck at long-distance.”
“I won’t. But she’s having trouble taking no for an answer. She can be intense when she wants me to do something with her. Hell, she’s the reason I had so much fun at Northwestern—I definitely wouldn’t have, like, gone skinny-dipping in Lake Michigan if it weren’t for her.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Now, that is something I’m sad I missed.”
“I’m sure.” I sipped my beer. “I think she’s just hurting. I’m having a hard time being a good friend.”
“Hurting how?”
Kristen in our hotel suite, Paolo’s blood freckling her jaw: He attacked me.
“I mean, she’s lonely. She has friends there, but not a best friend. Anyway, I wanna hear about you! What did I miss? Are you working on any cool projects?”
“Oh, nothing interesting.” His hand slid from my shoulder to the back of my neck. He hit me with a soft-focus stare, then kissed me. I thought my heart would pound right out of my chest—and for the first time in forever, it was out of elation, not fear.
Boyfriend. He’d called himself my boyfriend. He’d claimed me as his girlfriend. For so long I’d been afraid to hope for it, and now it was happening, it was real, it was better than I’d dreamed. I set my palm on his squared-off jawline, pressing into the stubble there, and kissed him back.
I broke away first, with a shy giggle. “Hi, boyfriend,” I tried.
“ ’Sup, girl,” he joked back, then threaded his fingers through mine. “Hey, tell me more about Kristen. I should know more about my girlfriend’s best friend.”
My nervous system sped up, like someone had turned a dial. “She’s the best. Totally bold and adventurous.”
“I like how you two get yourselves into trouble together all over the globe.” He lifted our hands and inspected my nails again. “Still dirty! I still want to hear about this epic hike.”
No. Alarm washed through me, rinsing away the warmth. How could I be in a serious relationship when I kept losing my shit?
“It was, uh, kind of a mess. We got lost, wound up fighting about it. Worst part of the trip, really.” I quaffed at the sudsy beer. My other hand, still in Aaron’s, now felt clammy and cold.
“Whoa, all right. We don’t have to talk about it. What else happened on the trip?”
I set my glass down. “You’re so sweet to ask, but I’m kinda sick of rehashing it. And I care about your life! What’s new?”
He leaned back easily. “Workwise, this big package-design thing just fell through. They decided to find someone on this site where artists bid on work. Cheapest labor wins.”
“Yikes. Aren’t those designers devaluing the work for everyone?”
He shrugged. “I get it, people need to get food on the table. And I’m lucky, I’ve always got the café.”
“Man, nobody can ruffle you, huh?”
He grinned. “I don’t see the point of thinking everyone’s out to get you.”
Like I do. Paolo’s family, the dawning realization he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Local cops, an investigation launched.
“I like how you see the world,” I told him, and gulped my beer.
* * *
—
When the bartender announced it was last call, Aaron and I walked over to his apartment hand in hand. I was determined to keep Chile tucked away, out of sight, out of mind. His roommate wasn’t home so we dropped onto the couch in the living room, and his record player cloaked the rabble of noisy bar patrons stumbling home below his windows.
For a few minutes, it was fine—exciting, fun, making out on the sofa with that swirly feeling of mutual attraction. But then I moved to climb onto his lap and my hand found his rough arm, and it hit me like a cymbal crash: Paolo’s bicep cold under my fingers; Sebastian’s sinewy back as we dragged him uphill. They were real—nightmares incarnate, acts that, though justified, could land us in jail.
I’d stiffened without realizing it, and Aaron touched my shoulders. “You all right?”
“Sorry—guess I’m a little on edge.”
“What’s up?”
I twisted and dropped onto the couch next to him. I longed to tell him, to open up about what was really wrong…but I couldn’t. “Just kinda in my own head. I swear it has nothing to do with you.”
“Okay. You wanna talk about it?”
Then suddenly I was crying, tears spilling down my cheeks while another part of me broke off and watched in horror: Get it together, Emily, before you scare off your new boyfriend. “I’m sorry!” I blurted out. “I know I’m being weird.”
“No, it’s okay,” he replied, but his eyes registered bewilderment, alarm. He didn’t exactly deny it—I was being a weirdo. He stood and hurried away, and my heart plummeted. Well, that hadn’t taken long.
“Here!” He reemerged with a box of tissues, and one made a zipping sound as I yanked it from the top. “C’mere. It’s okay.” He sat next to me and wrapped me in his arms. “What’s going on?”
I’d kill to be able to tell him—I’d give anything to just let it out. Instead I reined in the tears and pulled away. “I’m so sorry. It’s not you at all. I should…I should actually start heading home, though.”
“Oh. Okay.” He looked wounded. “Can I walk you to your car?”
“No, thanks so much, but I’m fine.”
But as soon as I got outside and turned the corner, I regretted my decision. The block was empty now, blackness pooling between the sallow streetlights. I was wearing leather boots with stacked heels, which produced a steady clop-clop-clop against the sidewalk. I tromped down the street under a thicket of tree branches, their buds protruding like goosebumps, and made my footfalls as quiet as possible. Literally tiptoeing around, trying to get home unnoticed. Something moved behind me and I gasped, but it was just a shadow in the beam of the nearest streetlight, a woman crossing the road fifteen feet away. Finally I flung myself into my car and locked the door.
On the drive home, winding through deserted city roads, I thought again of my footsteps, the cursed clomp of my boot. The giveaway that kept me from skulking through the night, unbothered. The irony: I’d been thrilled when Aaron noticed me, and when, tonight, he called me his girlfriend. But on the street, I tried to creep past any other male gazes, ghostlike. That’s womanhood, I suppose, both craving and feeling repulsed by attention.
And not just from men. Take my parents—I skimmed past them like floaters in their vision, a refraction of light in the retina. It wasn’t until college that I began to see their disinterest for what it was: emotional neglect. And yet a dude on the street moaning, “Mm, good morning,” as I passed could curdle my stomach, sour my mood. Which was worse, being invisible or being seen? It was exhausting: the ego, the desire to be noticed—even admired—always dilating and contracting, flapping open and crumpling closed, over and over and over.
What did I look like to Sebastian when he backed me against the wall, pinned me in place? I pulled into my driveway right as the awful highlight reel looped: a crash of fury and adrenaline as Sebastian’s flesh yielded beneath my teeth; Kristen with the floor lamp; Stop. Stop. Stop.
The sudden give when his body left our arms and tumbled toward the blue-gray water below.
God, I was broken. Tears pricked my eyes one more time as I climbed toward my front door.
Poor Aaron.
He had no idea what he’d signed on for.
CHAPTER 13
“I feel like I shouldn’t be here.”
Adrienne Oderdonk, LMFT, was in her late fifties or so, with curly gray hair and kind brown eyes. A nondescript therapist in a nondescript building with pediatricians and realtors and dentists dotting the directory near the front door. She smiled serenely. “And why’s that?”
“I guess I…got the message that therapy is for the weak.” I’d grown up with negative knee-jerk reactions to it, in fact. When, fifteen years ago, a cousin had switched careers to get her PsyD, my dad had sneered at the concept over breakfast.
“Shrinks are charlatans,” he’d said, as if deeming water wet. He shook open his newspaper and turned the page. “Charging two hundred bucks an hour to listen to suckers talk about their feelings. But hey, more power to her.”
“Do you think it’s for the weak?” Adrienne asked.
“Well, I’m here because I think I should be stronger, so I guess that confirms it.” My laugh was like a bark.
“Let’s try to keep ‘should’ out of the conversation.”
“Right.” I took in the spiral-bound notebook on the side table next to her, the clock ticking down our fifty minutes together. The box of tissues on the coffee table, anticipating snot and tears.
Priya had recommended Adrienne, and I’d skulked into her waiting room like a kid sent to the principal’s office. I felt weird about going to a therapist after Kristen warned against it last year, but I wasn’t sure I had a choice: I was almost thirty, in my first grown-up relationship, and on the brink of screwing everything up.
“When you say you want to be stronger, what do you mean?” she asked.
I looked away. Strong enough to stuff my panic into a box. Strong enough to get through the day—an hour, even—without a slap of fear that Paolo will be found. Strong enough to hear a ringing phone and not freeze up assuming it’s the Chilean police. I’d looked into it after Cambodia—though there was no guarantee the U.S. would extradite me, if I was charged I’d have my face in the news, my passport flagged. My life ruined.
“Uh…more in control of my emotions, I guess. Like…like other people are.” By other people, of course, I meant Kristen. What was I doing here? I couldn’t tell her the truth: that it seemed likely, even inevitable, that we’d be caught. Kristen had been the mastermind last year, and of course her plan worked—we got away with it. But in Chile, I’d been in charge, and I was shaky and shortsighted, my confidence feigned. Any day now, they’d triangulate Paolo’s last known whereabouts, his very visible night out in Quiteria. What’s the proper way to ask a therapist to assuage your realistic concerns?
Answer: Tell her about another realistic concern. “So, last year, I…I was attacked, during a hookup, and I had a rough time recovering.”
“I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
“Thanks. I—I was a mess at first, to be honest. I could barely get through the day. But my best friend, she lives in Australia, but even so, she was there for me every single day during that period. Piecing me together until I started to feel like myself again. But then…”
